Industiarlization before Industiarlization

This book presents an analysis of this 'industrialization before industrialization'.

Peter Kriedte (Author), Hans Medick (Author), Jurgen Schlumbohm (Author)

9780521282284, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 January 1982

348 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.51 kg

Beginning in the late Middle Ages, and accelerating in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there developed in many rural regions of Europe a domestic industry, mass-producing craft goods for distant markets. This book presents an analysis of this 'industrialization before industrialization', and considers the question whether it constituted a distinct mode of production, different from the preceding feudal economy and from subsequent industrial capitalism, or was part of a process of continuous evolution characterized by the spread of wage labour and the penetration of capitalism into the process of production. It is a full-scale attempt to take a look at the place of proto-industrialization in the genesis of capitalism, and will interest economic and social historians, as well as anthropologists, sociologists, and others concerned with the development of capitalism.

1. The origins, the agrarian context, and the conditions in the world market
2. The proto-industrial family economy
3. The structures and function of population-development under the proto-industrial system
4. Relations of production - productive forces - crises in proto-industrialization
5. Excursus: the political and institutional framework of proto-industrialization
6. Proto-industrialization between industrialization and deindustrialization.

Subject Areas: History [HB]